A stressful toll on haggard cops

After helping to evacuate hundreds in Katrina's wake, Sgt. Paul Accardo (right) killed himself, possibly over his inability to help more. Another officer also committed suicide.

September 08, 2005|By Paul Salopek, Tribune correspondent.

NEW ORLEANS — After spending his career reassuring the people of New Orleans that the forces of law and order always prevail, police Sgt. Paul Accardo wasn't supposed to die this way.

Not sitting in numbed despair in his patrol car. Not parked alone outside a shuttered restaurant some 40 miles from his hurricane-gutted city. Not with his own service pistol in his hand.

Accardo, a well-known New Orleans Police Department media affairs officer, fatally shot himself in the head Saturday. A colleague, Patrolman Lawrence Celestine, killed himself in the same manner the day before. And the news of the two men's shocking deaths quickly emerged as the pre-eminent symbol of the ruthless toll that Hurricane Katrina has inflicted on New Orleans' overwhelmed emergency response personnel, and on the city's historically troubled police force in particular.

"Paul always came across as the perfect policeman," said a still-stunned Capt. Marlon Defillo, Accardo's supervisor. "He was a spit-and-polish officer. He never complained about any duty. Never. But what we've been through this past week wasn't duty. It was hell."

Accardo, 36, who was to be buried Wednesday in Baton Rouge, indeed seemed a perfect choice for public spokesman of the newly revamped New Orleans Police Department.

The once impoverished force, which had gained a dismal reputation for police brutality and corruption through much of the 1990s, had just cleared its last U.S. Department of Justice civil rights probe in March 2004. And Accardo, the youthful and clean-scrubbed officer with an easy smile and a crisp uniform, showed up frequently on local TV sets as the face of the reformed police force.

That is, until Katrina ripped a gaping hole through the department, and swept its affable spokesman forever away.

"Look, some men have left our ranks because they couldn't deal with this catastrophe," said Deputy Chief Warren Riley, who estimated that of the 1,641 officers on the payroll in New Orleans before the storm, only about 1,000 have returned to active duty so far.

"Like other citizens, we lost our homes. Some of us lost our loved ones. We had no ammo. No communications. We were without food and water," Riley added. "As to what exact circumstances led up to Paul's death, we simply don't know, and maybe never will."

But at least this much of his last hours can be reconstructed from interviews with colleagues and family.

Accardo, a soft-spoken New Orleans native who was a stickler for protocol and neatness, seemed utterly undone by the awesome scale of the hurricane's chaos and destruction, fellow officers said. By the time Katrina breached New Orleans' levees early last week, sending floodwaters gushing through the city and forcing thousands to scramble for their lives, Accardo began acting strange.

"He just couldn't believe what was happening," said Defillo, his superior officer. "It took him three or four seconds to answer simple questions. His clothes were all disheveled. It wasn't like him."

Officer felt helpless

Accardo's home was wiped out by floodwaters. But what unmoored the officer far more, Defillo said, was his inability to alleviate the tide of human suffering engulfing his city.

"We were going out in big military trucks, passing up desperate people because we were already too full--old people, poor people," said Defillo. "Paul took it hard. He didn't want to leave them behind."

Finally, after spending nine nightmarish hours helping to evacuate some 30,000 people from the pestilential confines of the Superdome, Accardo stopped talking altogether. His alarmed superiors ordered him to take a day off to decompress.

Accardo drove aimlessly to the nearby town of Luling. There, in his patrol car--a vehicle he ordinarily kept immaculately washed and waxed--he took his life. Ever considerate, the department spokesman left a note with a police phone number for passersby to call and report his death.

"He fell on his sword," said Thomas Accardo, Paul's brother. "I think he decided he was dishonored. He couldn't protect the people of New Orleans as he was sworn to do. He couldn't save those who wanted to be saved."

Standing on the stoop of an uncle's house in Baton Rouge, Thomas Accardo described a police-obsessed little brother while Paul's wife, Anne Accardo, stood by, covering her mouth with her hands to stifle sobs.

Paul had always wanted to be a New Orleans police officer, Thomas recalled. At age 6, their mother made him a birthday cake with NOPD--the department's acronym--emblazoned across the top. And as an applicant to the force, the skinny youth had flattened fishing sinkers into sheets of lead, and hidden the metal inside his shoes to pass weight requirements for academy recruits.

Less is known about the department's other suicide.

Patrolman Celestine, a former narcotics officer and savvy street cop, shot himself Friday in front of a colleague after being ordered to take a day off due to stress, police officials said.